Marriage equality is being promoted by political elites who want to undermine organized religion and move America closer toward a totalitarian regime – or at least that’s the explanation coming from leaders at the National Organization for Marriage (NOM).

On Wednesday, NOM’s Ruth Institute launched a new podcast series which will air interviews with prominent anti-gay “scholars and community leaders.” The first episode of the series featured Thomas Peters, NOM’s cultural director, who struggled to explain his organization’s historic losses on Election Day.

At one point in the interview, Ruth Institute President Jennifer Morse asked Peters why “rich people” have been so supportive of the fight for marriage equality:

MORSE: Why do the rich people of our country want gay marriage so badly? ... There are a bunch of rich Republicans who are dumping money into this thing who, as far as I can tell, are not gay. That was the pattern we saw in New York state. The first big legislature that we really lost, we lost because of big Wall Street Republican money going in on the gay marriage side. Do you have any thoughts about that Tom?

[…]

PETERS: Well I think there’s a broad number of reasons. I will say one thing that legalized same-sex marriage is is a repudiation of the West’s religious tradition. If you look at other countries where you had strong, I don’t know, left and right governments that lean towards the totalitarian side, organized religion is the single greatest check on the expanse of government power. And so if you can stand up to the religious communities in this country and say “we’re going to redefine something you see as a sacrament deeply embedded in the nature reality and the history of the church since Christ came,” you can do a lot more. So I think you find an affinity on our opponents’ side when it comes to saying “no” to the continued influence of the church in the public square.

Peters’ answer – which sounds a lot like an Alex Jones conspiracy theory – isn’t new for anti-gay commentators, who have for years asserted that expanding the freedom to marry somehow increases government control. Morse herself has accused “totalitarian” pro-equality activists of trying to “control every institution in society.”

Still, this kind of answer reveals NOM’s inability to deal with the fact that America’s support for same-sex marriage is growing. “Rich people” support marriage equality for the same reasons that voters in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington do: because there is no compelling reason to deny gays and lesbians the freedom to marry.